Run Time // “If mistakes felt like mistakes in the moment, we wouldn’t make them, would we?” // This story opens up with two directors going to this home near the site of where they are filming a horror movie. On the way there they are nearly attacked by a huge flying thing with red eyes but think it’s just a big owl. The people they are warning, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. But then we cut to a scene of the movie they are making, with a girl named Kate who is an aspiring writer and meets this new author at a bookstore. Then we get our actual main character: Adele, who has left Ireland for LA in the hopes of launching her acting career. She is known well in Ireland for being on a soap opera but when she left to do other projects the work was hard to come by. And we don’t know the full story at first but there was some sort of movie project that went wrong before she left Ireland. But then she gets a call from a producer who wants her to return to Ireland to star in a horror movie because the lead actress has dropped out. Adele thinks this is her chance to break out again. When she travels there though she gets a text from an unknown number telling her to not go there because it’s dangerous. But the place has bad cell reception. Also there are some interesting characters. She finds a woman’s missing earring in a bed and also a note in one of her outfits for the shoot. She realizes she never got the name of the woman who she is replacing. It was interesting to get the script side by side with what was happening. It was a very meta story because the girl in the script was reading a book that was mirroring what was happening. Anyway one day Adele wakes up and everyone is gone, and strange things start happening on the set with the door randomly opening and things appearing that weren’t there before, just like in the script. She doesn’t have any cell service and leaves the property and it feels like someone is following her. She tried to contact her friends Lindsey and Julia and I was sort of suspicious of Julia at this point because she sounded like she knew about this project and we also know in the past Adele accompanied her to like a casting call when they were younger and Adele was chosen for the soap opera instead of her. Anyway. She runs into Dugal (I listened to the audiobook so I’m not quite sure on spelling) and tells her they were trying to reach her and had just gone into town. But things are still fishy. We also learn about Adele’s most recent project where on set people were really mean to her and messed with her script and her call times and she started to lose it. She opens up to Dougal about her past, but when he disappears inside a part of the house she investigates and finds them filming her. The truth is that this whole film is basically the meta film where one of the guys wants to try to make a movie where the actress is *actually* scared. Which seems like an obvious conclusion but it’s not that simple. Adele finds out that the director from the last movie is on set and that freaks her out because of the way that things ended. She tries to sneak off the set and runs into Julia, who is staying on the property. Julia plays it off that she is staying on the property because she was worried about Adele and came to see her, but it becomes clear that there is something seriously wrong with Julia, and she admits that was become all the weird things happening to Adele on the first movie set and also this one, all because she wanted to be an actress so bad. She was even with the director of the other movie and Adele got the part instead of Julia. It drove her insane because she wanted it so bad. Julia is also the one who wrote the script for Final Draft, and in that we find out the Kate, the main character of that story, finds out her close friend is the true murderer and he was terrorizing Kate so that he could write a bestselling true crime fiction novel. But Kate fights him off and then goes to publish her story herself, but she’s haunted by this guy in the audience. Anyway, Julia tries to drive them off a cliff but they survive. She decides to stop acting, which I don’t blame her. I enjoyed the story and while the end didn’t blow me away I really love the idea of the “story within a story within a story” concept and I commend the author for taking that on.